Had a request from a client today that wasn’t readily apparent to me, so I thought I’d write up a quick blog post. For this site, we’d enabled item language fallback for most of the page items so that if a page isn’t translated yet, at least some version will appear on the site. This is fine, but there are some [...]

I was reminded this morning of an often overlooked part of Sitecore’s config file patching system. By now we all should be familiar with the patch: directives: patch:before – inserts the element before the specified element. patch:after – inserts the element after the specified element. patch:attribute – defines or replaces the [...]

Ran into an issue with a client today that was pretty interesting, they were using an SVG image for the main logo, and it was being altered when it was rendered out on the delivery server. The SVG they uploaded had about 23 paths defined in it, and the one that was ending up on the site had only 12. There was a need to vary the color of [...]

I recently was upgrading a customer site from Sitecore v7.2 to v8.2. I usually stay away from the “Inital Release” of a Sitcore version, but I really wanted to use the “Express” upgrade option (quotes intentional) and this customer really wants to use language fallback for some areas of the site. I knew going into [...]

Since I tend to work on a diverse set of projects, I’m often starting with a “bare metal” Windows box where I need to do my Sitecore development. For some time now, IIS and ASP.NET are not enabled by default (but are obviously required by Sitecore.) As a note to my future self, here is the easiest way to enable what is [...]

Sometimes this blog serves as more of a notebook for me to save things I end up looking up a bunch of times. In this case, I find myself needing to backup all of the Sitecore databases for a particular instance, so I’ve adapted the SQL Script from this MSSQL Tips post.

If you’ve used Hedgehog’s Team Development for Sitecore (TDS) in a CI/CD environment, you’ve undoubtedly felt your initial joy of having Sitecore items automatically deploy to your various environments quickly turn to pain when you realize how long deployments take. For every deployment, every item is processed during [...]

While in the process of testing a site that is being upgraded to Sitecore v8.1 a serious issue was uncovered – none of the pages would preview. After looking into the error, some code that was dependant on the site context was not correctly resolving to the correct site. Instead, the site context was “website” as [...]

The following is a presentation I gave at the Milwaukee SItecore Developer meetup. The presentation was sort of a back to basics for developing on the Sitecore platform. There were a few technical issues, especially during the demo, but I think the video holds up. If you are interested, the slide deck I used for the presentation is on [...]

I recently was trying to troubleshoot some performance issue in the search function of a Sitecore 7.5 site I was working on. The search results were served via an MVC controller action that returned JSON to the front end code. We were seeing very large request times, and one of the culprits was thought to be item access being performed [...]